Assorted Nerdery

I’m an engineer living in a small city north of Boston with my wife, two kids and two cats.

My webdesign-fu is pretty weak, but I’m aiming for a adequately readable experience with minimal cruft. I recently discovered the Zen Hugo theme and have modified it here. Any suggestions are very welcome!

Getting the T-Mobile Jet (Huawei 366) USB Modem to work in Linux

[BostonEnginerd] - 21 September, 2015

I recently purchased a cheap T-mobile broadband USB stick for use with my Debian Linux laptop. The device is the T-Mobile Jet 2.0 – a rebranded Huawei UMG366.

After putting the SIM card in, I noticed that NetworkManager was unable to see the card. Some DuckDuckGo-ing led me to this Linux Mint forum post.

Apparently these sticks show up as a USB hard drive when you plug them in. This lets them include the drivers with the stick. Ejecting the drive activates the internet connection. You can use a piece of software called usb\\_modeswitch to change the device mode.

Internets on a Plane! (and service blocking)

[BostonEnginerd] - 16 August, 2015

I fly UA quite often and regularly get internet on my flights. The speed and connection quality is quite acceptable considering that we’re traveling through the air and talking through some satellites. The rate is also quite reasonable - $1.99/hr for the slow lane and $3.99/hr for the fast lane.

However, on my last two trips, the following things have been blocked:

VPN access - I typically use a VPN when I travel to protect my wifi traffic. As the access points are unencrypted, I prefer to encrypt and route my traffic through a trusted host. It seems that they’re blocking most of the gateways for my VPN provider.
web.skype.com — Although I understand that you can’t really support VOIP, text chatting over the Skype web interface should be perfectly acceptable. I’d like to avoid installing Skype on my nice Linux laptop.
XMPP blocked - again, text chatting should be acceptable. TCP to ports 5222 and 5223 are blocked.
UDP to ports 60000+ is blocked. This means that I’m unable to use MOSH to connect to my home servers. I often chat through IRSSI + Bitlbee running on a server in my house.

I verified that in each case, the service I was trying to connect to was up.

GnuPG key update

[BostonEnginerd] - 21 February, 2015

Notmuch of a mail setup Part 1- mbsync, msmtp and systemd

[BostonEnginerd] - 16 January, 2015

Overview

Some months back, I discovered the Notmuch mail reader. It’s a pretty sweet piece of software based on Xapian to index and tag your mail. As of today, the email setup described here has displaced my Google Apps hosted Gmail for my personal domain. My goal here is to document how I’ve setup my mail workflow.

As it says in the name, Notmuch is not much of a mail client. It doesn’t get any mail, send any mail, or even display any mail. All it does is to provide an interface to a Xapian index for your mail. We need to provide other software that will help us handle the other pieces.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation!

[BostonEnginerd] - 14 January, 2015

I recently attended a Quantified Self meetup at the Microsoft NERD center in Kendall. It was very well organized – thanks to Joshua Kotfila and Maggie Delano. Hopefully future meetups have more people presenting!

The event consists of two main parts – a pre-talk social session and a series of talks. There were a few people and companies showing off their projects before the talk.

One of the groups showing before the talk was a company called Thync. They are attempting to bring a Trans-cranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) device to the market. TDCS has been shown in a number of studies to have positive effects on learning – language learning if I recall correctly. It’s also supposedly safe. They were offering demonstrations of their new device at the event.